CIRCA 1805

These handsome seats are designed in the French/antique manner promoted around 1800 by George, Prince of Wales, later George IV, and his Rome-trained architect Charles Heathcote Tatham, author of Etchings of Ancient Ornamental Architecture, London, 1799. The French Empire style tabouret trestles support elegantly scrolled seats in the Grecian Ionic manner; while their backs are palm-flowered and antique fluted in the Roman sarcophagus fashion, and display Bacchic lion-heads, appropriate for festive banqueting halls, beside medallioned cartouches probably originally intended for heraldic display. These chairs may have inspired a closely related 'Grecian Hall Chair' pattern issued in Thomas Sheraton's The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803 (pl.51). George Smith publishes similar 'X Seats' in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration of 1808, pl.53. A pair of hall chairs of a related design was sold from the collection of Michael Lipitch, Sotheby's London, 22 May 1998, lot 26 (£12,650).